This has been
around for awhile but since it’s pretty clever, I thought I’d pass it by you
anyway. (And no, I have no clue if any of the computations are even close to
being correct…)
No known species of reindeer can fly. However, there are 300,000 species of
living organisms yet to be classified and while most of these are insects and
germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has
ever seen.
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
However, since Santa does not normally visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
or Buddhist (except maybe in
This is to say
that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000'th
of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the
stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks
have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get
onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the
earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes
of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a
total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This
means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed
of sound.
For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space
probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can
run at 15 miles per hour. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting
element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO
set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting
Santa himself.
On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even
granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal
amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them --- Santa would
need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of
the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen
Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per
second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the
same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair
of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In
short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a
second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a
dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in
0.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250
pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the
sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs
and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID try to deliver presents on Christmas Eve,
he's been vaporized by now…
Author unknown…
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